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Comment by dynamite-ready | Hacker News Reader

Godot is one of the most awe inspiring open source projects out there. It's vast, but yet so well documented, user friendly, and incredibly well maintained. If you're thinking about using Unity for something, but was weary of the business model, Godot will surprise you.

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I disagree on the documentation front. I find the docs hard to use, and missing things.

I actually gave up on Godot early last year because of frustrations trying to get basic in-or-under-documented things working. Even simple things like getting 2D sorting working correctly so that sprites overlap correctly was surprisingly hard (documentation said to enable y-sort flag, but in reality there were some gotchas that took me a long time to figure out). It’s a nice engine and it’s constantly improving, but it’s not really as user friendly as people make it out to be (or at least it wasn’t in early 2018, it might be a lot better now on that front). I even contributed to GDNative so I was somewhat bought into it, but in the end it wasn’t worth it for what I wanted to do. I’ll probably check it out again in the future (for now I’m too busy with non-gamedev stuff)

I gave up two times but I wanted to learn game development and I'm planning to spend the next 10 years into it. I thought Godot is my correct choice but the docs are hard to read I agree but lot of youtube tutorials out there and at this point YouTubers covered pretty much everything to create AAA or platformer game.

A thousand times this.

It's often easier to just try random things and see what works than to find answers in the documentation. It usually does not miss topics or tutorials, but the API is incomplete.

The good part is that API documentation is the easiest one to create. The troubling part is that API documentation is the easiest one to create...

I was bitten by navmesh merging in 3D, say you have several loaded scenes, each with a navmesh. If the navmesh points are matching up to an undocumented degree, the navmeshes will be merged. This is dependent upon the scene own Transform, as floating point will yield slightly different float results depending on how the navmesh point are transformed to world space. I ended up generating navmesh from an apriori description instead of Godot scenes. "optimized" path-finding into these navmesh was surprisingly poor too (considering a lot of the rest is great).

The problem is that none of the problems are documented.

I don't understand how the development is financed. Is it just a hobby project?

It’s supported through Patreon.

Ah, yeah. Found this now(1). Awesome to see when open source financing actually works. And amazing that two full time developers (and non paid open source contributors) can compete with the financial muscles of Unity.

(1) - https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/b0fqoy/godot_financi...

Most commits are from unpaid contributors: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/commits/master

My guess is that a lot of it comes from companies using Godot fixing bugs that affect them, plus hobbyist as well.

I believe there is a lot of financial support from gambling / casino gaming companies - where the entire source code is required for auditing purposes, and solutions like Unity are just unsuitable given this constraint.

The irony of creating opensource to improve the world freeing it from private-only alternatives only to be majorly financed by one of the worst parts of modern society: instant online money gambling

I would say by the consequence of strong regulation of one of the worst parts of society, but I get your point

Would absolutely love a pointer to such auditing requirements. Very interested in how they are specified as well as what entities are driving the requirements (state law, insurance, casinos, ?).

It was originally a commercial engine so it was used to build commercial games. Then they open sourced it. Now its funded by patreon and it looks like the lead devs have consulting companies for the engine itself.

What part of the business model do people not like?

Closed source.

Their subscription model gives Unity the ability to change the TOS under dev's feet. [0]

Unity eventually walked back this change after a prolonged negative press campaign on Twitter, but counting on Twitter mobs to solve your future problems is a really bad business strategy.

I occasionally use closed-source programs for development, but I don't use programs where the output is constrained by a license, and I don't use programs where the TOS that binds me can be changed on a whim. I'll use a closed-source program like Aseprite or Reaper, I won't use Creative Cloud or Unity. The benefits aren't worth the risk.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan...

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